I meant for this to be my big non political post but the previous post eclipsed it.
Yup. I’m over half way through the Teacher Wars. Its very sympathetic to teachers in America through history. I bought it the year it was published at a book corner at that year’s Minnesota State School Board convention. I promptly got embroiled in battles on the School board and never read it. I’m finally rectifying it. It is ten years later and there is more blood in the schools…..metaphoric blood. The last chapter got to one of my early bad guys Al Shanker who became one of my heroes for pushing Charter Schools. He meant it a lot differently than the way Republicans came to champion and the way I brought Charter Schools to Duluth.
I haven’t written much about Charters for a long time but I’m going to check my search function and see how many posts mention “charter schools.” Hmmm. 119 posts. I would have thought it would have been more.
I will almost certainly finish this book. It took me through Integration. Modern teacher unionization falling afoul of Black America, Its heading into charter and will follow that up with Bush era measures of student results. That has been my Era of School Board work…….and now its utter destruction of public schools or so it feels. That’s a lot of ground to cover although this blog has tried to stay ahead of it all.
The other book is Harry Potter Number 1. I bought this book to read to my kids on the strength of a very positive story in Newsweek a good half year before Harry Potter mania hit America. I’m reading it now chapter by chapter in advance of reading a French version of the book while listening to a French readers read it in French on Audible. I am in a post Duolingo phase of learning to speak French like the French at a level a little higher than my Peppa the Pig en francais cartoons.